Jim laughed unsteadily; his pale eye had a greenish animal glare. "I'm a mere wreck--a poor broken-down, drunken actor; and yet it's curious how often it happens that the shaking, unaccustomed hand sends in the killing shot!" But Stewart Thrall loved Sybil with a difference. His life had become a drear, monotonous triviality. He had been sick to death of those brief amours that ring truest to the sound of gold. Love had so long degenerated into a coarse appetite that it had at last become veritable dead-sea fruit to him. But this little girl had thrilled him into life again, had aroused his ambition, touched his heart to tenderness and respect and love--real love, that made him try to be the man she thought him, that made him shake with fear lest she find him unworthy--as he knew himself to be. His passion was so adorned with poetry and grace and charm, so surrounded with every illusion his intellect could invent, that a wiser than Sybil Lawton might well have been swept unquestioningly into his arms. He knew the abyss he faced. He knew there was that "afterward," but he had trusted blindly to his own powers of concealment--to his self-control. Stewart Thrall's self-control! Truly, the devil has many a jest offered him in all gravity! But right or wrong--and it was all very wrong--he loved her with heart and brain, and being what he was, the immediate moment was sufficient. He was careful of the conventions, but so far as he dared he surrounded his Princess, his beloved, with the enchantments of luxury. Her rooms were bowers of flowers (they bore various cards on arrival), rare books, precious bibelots; but his fierce jealousy denied her a living pet. And in this fool's paradise they were walking, their feet among the grasses and the flowers, their beautiful mad heads high in the clouds, when the curtain rose on the play one night. The crowded house watching for Juliet's coming, at her laughing "How now, who calls?" broke into welcoming applause, which continued so long that she was forced to acknowledge the greeting. As she turned again and faced her mother, Lady Capulet, she saw a woman in the stage-box. She was alone. She leaned forward a little and looked intently, piercingly straight into her face, and Sybil noticed that the woman's hand resting on the box ledge clenched itself hard.